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Black Skin, White Masks - Wikipedia

Black Skin, White Masks - Wikipedia


Black Skin, White Masks

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Black Skin, White Masks
Cover of the first edition
AuthorFrantz Fanon
Original titlePeau noire, masques blancs
TranslatorCharles L. Markmann (1967)
Richard Philcox (2008)
LanguageFrench
SeriesCollections Esprit. La condition humaine
SubjectsBlack race
Racial discrimination
Racism
Nigrescence
PublisherÉditions du Seuil (France)
Grove Press (US)
Publication date
1952
Publication placeFrance
Published in English
1967
Media typePrint
Pages222

Black Skin, White Masks (French: Peau noire, masques blancs) is a 1952 book by philosopher-psychiatrist Frantz Fanon. The book is written in the style of autoethnography, with Fanon sharing his own experiences while presenting a historical critique of the effects of racism and dehumanization, inherent in situations of colonial domination, on the human psyche.[1]

The violent overtones in Fanon can be broken down into two categories: The violence of the colonizer through annihilation of body, psyche, culture, along with the demarcation of space, and secondly, the violence of the colonized as an attempt to retrieve dignity, sense of self, and history through anti-colonial struggle.[2]

Summary

Black Skin, White Masks applies a historical critique on the complex ways in which identity, particularly Blackness, is constructed and produced. Fanon confronts complex formations of colonized psychic constructions of Blackness. He applies psychoanalysis to explain the feelings of dependency and inadequacy that black people experience. Fanon portrays white people as having a deep-seated fear of educated blacks. He argues that, no matter how assimilated to white norms a black person may become, whites will always exercise a sense of 'inferiority.' This way of thinking was designed to keep 'Blacks' stuck in an "inferior status within a colonial order." The divided self-perception of a Black Subject who has lost his native cultural origin, and embraced the culture of the Mother Country, produces an inferior sense of self in the "Black Man." The Black Man will try to appropriate and imitate the culture of the colonizer—donning the "white masks" of the book's title. Such behavior is more readily evident in upwardly mobile and educated Black people who can afford to acquire status symbols within the world of the colonial ecumene, such as an education abroad and mastery of the language of the colonizer.

Based upon, and derived from, the concepts of the collective unconscious and collective catharsis, the sixth chapter, "The Negro and Psychopathology", presents brief, deep psychoanalyses of colonized black people, and thus proposes the inability of black people to fit into the norms (social, cultural, racial) established by white society (the colonizer). That "a normal Negro child, having grown up in a normal Negro family, will become abnormal on the slightest contact of the white world."[3] That, in a white society, such an extreme psychological response originates from the unconscious and unnatural training of black people, from early childhood, to associate "blackness" with "wrongness". That such unconscious mental training of black children is effected with comic books and cartoons, which are cultural media that instil and affix, in the mind of the white child, the society's cultural representations of black people as villains. Moreover, when black children are exposed to such images of villainous black people, the children will experience a psychopathology (psychological trauma), which mental wound becomes inherent to their individual, behavioral make-up: a part of the child's personality. That the early-life suffering of said psychopathology – black skin associated with villainy – creates a collective nature among the men and women who were reduced to colonized populations. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon speaks about Mayotte Capécia and Abdoulaye Sadji, writers contemporary with him. Fanon describes I Am a Martinican Woman and Nini, mulâtresse du Sénégal as examples of some of the cultural damage of colonization. Capécia, a black woman, wants to marry a white man despite the social and cultural boundaries in place. Fanon believes Capécia is desperate for white approval. The colonial culture has left an impression on black Martinican women to believe that "whiteness is virtue and beauty" and that they can in turn "save their race by making themselves whiter."

In section B of chapter seven, on "The Black Man and Hegel", Fanon examines the dialectics of the philosopher and conveys his suspicions of the black man being under the rubric of a philosophy modeled after whiteness. According to Fanon there is a conflict that takes form internally as self-deprecation because of this white philosophical affirmation.

Reception

First published in French in Paris, Black Skin, White Masks (1952) did not attract much mainstream attention in English-speaking countries. It explored the effects of colonialism and imposing a servile psychology upon the colonized man, woman, and child. The adverse effects were assessed as part of the post-colonial cultural legacy of the Mother Country to former imperial subjects. The book was translated into English by Charles L. Markmann, and published by Grove Press in 1967. In 2008 Grove published a new translation of the book, by Richard Philcox, which, it claims, "updates its language for a new generation of readers" (although opinions are mixed as to which translation is preferable).[4]

Together with Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, it received wider attention during cultural upheavals starting in the 1960s, in the United States as well as former colonial countries in the Caribbean and Africa. It is considered an important anti-colonial, anti-racist, and Afro-pessimist work in Anglophone countries. But in Francophone countries, the book is ranked as a relatively minor Fanon work in comparison to his later, more radical works. The topic is explicitly connected culturally to the societies of the ethnic African and other peoples of color living within the French Colonial Empire (1534–1980).[5]

Black Skin, White Masks has been criticized as sexist and homophobic.[6] Among other statements, the book contains the remarks, "Just as there are faces that just ask to be slapped, couldn't we speak of women who just ask to be raped",[7] and "when a woman lives the fantasy of rape by a black man, it is a kind of fulfilment of a personal dream or an intimate wish",[8] and "the Negrophobic man is a repressed homosexual".[9]

Some of the book's psychological and psychiatric insights remain valid, especially as applied by peoples of diverse colonial and imperial histories, such as the Palestinians and Kurds in the Middle East, the Tamils in Sri Lanka, the African Americans in the US, and Puerto Ricans, in their contemporary struggles for cultural and political autonomy. Contemporary theorists of nationalism and of anti-colonialism, of liberation theology and of cultural studies, have preferred Frantz Fanon's later culturally and politically revolutionary works, such as The Wretched of the Earth (1962).[10] Nevertheless, Black Skin, White Masks continues to generate debate. In 2015, leading African studies scholar Lewis R. Gordon published a book titled What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction To His Life And Thought.[11]

Anthony Elliott writes that Black Skin, White Masks is a seminal work.[12]

Freedom and Blackness

Freedom and Blackness, according to Sidney Mintz, is not a culture deliberately set upon breaking "cultural rules and norms"; instead, its focus is to be free. Free to express themselves in a way that is authentic to the Caribbean culture, and free to be able to live free from those who were once called master. A culture separate from that of their European colonizers yet still be recognized on an equal level. This movement of freedom and blackness requires knowledge on multiple interdisciplinary studies, such as politics for emancipation, racial inequalities and post-emancipation, all within the context of a post-colonial world. Colonization, instead of helping countries, has destroyed culture all over the world. Colonization has enforced the thought process of "white supremacy" and has suppressed/eradicated cultures all over the Caribbean. An example of this, according to Fanon, is the Malagasy culture. He explains that the Malagasy culture has been colonized so much that if they were to be liberated, they would be left with nothing. Fanon regulates imagination of Blackness by his willingness to merely "envisage" through a rubric of epidermalization, which is yet another form of enclosure.[13]

Body Schema

Fanon reworks phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty's concept of the "body schema" in the fifth chapter of Black Skin, White Masks. For Merleau-Ponty, the body schema refers to the set of tendencies or habits a body acquires in its interaction with the world, typically operating at a preconscious or nonconscious level. He famously claims that "acquiring a habit [is] the reworking and renewal of the body schema."[14] However, Fanon challenges this understanding by arguing that the body schema is not simply shaped by habitual bodily action but by an "implicit knowledge" of the world that is inherently social and racialized. For Fanon, the formation of one's bodily awareness is from the outset marked by sociogenesis, that is, by social and historical forces.

On this basis, Fanon introduces the concept of the historical racial schema, emphasizing that Black individuals acquire their body schema under the white gaze within a white-dominated world. The racist discourses and practices that saturate this world shape how Black bodies are perceived and lived. This schema offers an account of how the lived experience of Blackness, always positioned as inferior and cast as a phobic or hated object—is inseparable from the long history of racism, slavery, and colonialism. These historical processes are woven into the very conditions of Black being-in-the-world, such that the experience of Black existence is haunted by a structural and inescapable alienation.

From this, Fanon develops a third schema: the epidermal racial schema. This concept articulates the lived experience of self-alienation specific to Black existence. In this schema, the Black subject is forced to adopt the white gaze, perceiving themselves as the object constructed by racist stereotypes. As Fanon writes, "disoriented, incapable of confronting the Other, ... I transported myself on that particular day far, very far, from myself and gave myself up as an object" (92).[15] By focusing on the epidermis, the surface of the skin, Fanon highlights how racism is not only discursive but deeply embodied. He implies that any critique of racism that overlooks its phenomenological and affective dimensions is ultimately insufficient.

Fanon's theorization of the body schema, historical racial schema, and epidermal racial schema has deeply influenced later thinkers in Black Studies and critical race theory. Scholars such as Hortense Spillers, Fred Moten, Calvin Warren, and Rizvana Bradley have taken up his emphasis on the visceral experience of racial objectification and the body as a site where racism is enacted. The notion of the "epidermal" also inspires Simone Browne's concept of digital epidermalization, which explores how the mechanisms Fanon described continue to operate in contemporary digital surveillance technologies.[16]

Phobogenesis

Phobogenesis is a term derived from psychiatry and psychoanalysis, and is specifically obtained from the concept of the phobic object.[17] This is a thing or person that elicits "irrational feelings of dread, fear, and hate" in a subject, and whose threat is often exaggerated.[18] In the context of race, Fanon postulates that the black person is a phobogenic object, sparking anxiety in the eyes of white subjects. Fanon's definition of phobia is based on that of French psychologist Angelo Hesnard, who defined phobia as a "neurosis characterized by the anxious fear of an object (in the broadest sense of anything outside the individual) or, by extension, of a situation".[19] Thus, black people as a phobogenic object elicit insecurity in white people.

Fanon follows Hesnard's definition to assert that this insecurity causes both fear and hatred of the phobogenic object at the same time. Therefore, in Fanon's theory, the white subject finds the black person both revolting and threatening simultaneously. The reaction induced by the phobogenic object is extremely irrational and exaggerated, as is the danger posed by it. The object is attributed "evil intentions and ... a malefic power", giving excessive weight to its threat to the white subject.[20] This reaction prioritizes emotion and affect in a manner that "defies all rational thinking", Fanon's words, highlighting that the psychiatric aspect of racial hatred is not clearly or rationally explicable.[17] As described by Fanon,the whole ideology sticks to one principle of perspective (the picture or illusion in one's mind) about something to convey a feeling or attitude.

See also

References

  1.  "Frantz Fanon", Grolier Encyclopedia of Knowledge, volume 7, p. 208.
  2.  "Nayar, Pramod", Frantz Fanon, Routledge, p. 70.
  3.  Fanon, Franz (1952). "The Negro and Psychopathology", in Black Skin, White Masks. France: Éditions du Seuil.
  4.  "The Platypus Affiliated Society – Book Review: Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks".
  5.  Silverman, Maxim; Max Silverman (2006). Frantz Fanon's 'Black Skin, White Masks': New Interdisciplinary Essays. Manchester University Press. p. 1.
  6.  Fanon and the Counterinsurgency of Education: Foreword by Ato Sekyi-Otu. Pg. 85. Netherlands: Brill, 2010.
  7.  Black Skin, White Masks, pg. 134
  8.  Black Skin, White Masks, pg. 156
  9.  Black Skin, White Masks, pg. 121
  10.  Bergner 1995, 75–76
  11.  Gordon, Lewis R.; Cornell, Drucilla (2015-01-01). What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction to His Life and Thought. Fordham University Press. ISBN 9780823266081.
  12.  Elliott, Anthony (2002). Psychoanalytic Theory: An Introduction. New York: Palgrave. p. 56. ISBN 0-333-91912-2.
  13.  "Moten, Fred", Black and Blur, Duke, p. 234.
  14.  Merleau-Ponty, Maurice; Landes, Donald A.; Carman, Taylor; Lefort, Claude; Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (2014). Phenomenology of perception (This ed. 1. publ. in paperback ed.). London New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-203-72071-4.
  15.  Fanon, Frantz (2008). Black Skin, White Masks. Richard Philcox, Kwame Anthony Appiah. Erscheinungsort nicht ermittelbar: Grove/Atlantic, Incorporated. ISBN 978-0-8021-4300-6.
  16.  Browne, Simone (2015). Dark matters: on the surveillance of blackness. Durham: Duke University Press. ISBN 978-0-8223-5919-7.
  17.  Fanon, Frantz. Peau Noire, Masques Blancs. Éditions Points, 2015, 235.
  18.  Hook, Derek. “Fanon and the Psychoanalysis of Racism,” n.d., 25.
  19.  Fanon, Frantz. Peau Noire, Masques Blancs. Éditions Points, 2015, 234.
  20.  Fanon, Frantz. Peau Noire, Masques Blancs. Éditions Points, 2015, 239.
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검은 피부 하얀 가면

위키백과, 우리 모두의 백과사전.

검은 피부 하얀 가면 (프랑스어: Peau noire, masques blancs)은 프란츠 파농(Frantz Fanon)이 1952년에 쓴 책이다. 프란츠 파농은 식민지 지배 속에 내재한 인종주의와 인간성 탈피에 대한 심리학을 연구했다.

 정신과 의사인 프란츠 파농은 흑인에 대한 탄압과 차별에 맞서기 위해 검은 피부 하얀 가면을 저술했다. 그는 흑인들이 백인들의 세상에서 경험하는 종속과 부적응의 감정을 설명하기 위해 정신 분석 이론을 적용했다. 자신의 문화를 잃어버리고 본국의 문화를 받아들인 흑인의 자아 인식의 분열이 식민지 개척자(백인)의 문화를 받아들이고 모방하려고 하는 흑인들에게 열등 콤플렉스를 심어준다고 했다. 그러한 행동들은 신분이 상승하고 교육받은 흑인들에게 더 잘 나타난다. 그들은 식민지 개척자의 언어와 서구의 교육과 같은 지위의 상징들을 습득할 기회가 있기 때문이다.

 집단 무의식과 집단 카타르시스의 개념에서 기인한 여섯번째 챕터 검둥이와 정신 병리학에서는 백인 사회에서의 사회적, 문화적, 인종적 규범들에 적응하지 못하는 식민화된 흑인들을 보여준다. 일반적인 검둥이 가족들에게서 자란 일반적인 검둥이 아이들은 백인들의 세상과 만나면 비정상이 된다. 백인들의 세상에서 그러한 극단적인 심리학적인 반응은 어릴 때부터 훈련된 '검다는 것은 잘못된 것'이라는 흑인들의 무의식에서 기인한다. 흑인 아이들의 그러한 무의식적인 훈련은 백인 아이들에게 흑인을 악당으로 표현하는 사회의 문화적 표현을 주입하는 만화들에 의해 영향을 받는다. 게다가, 흑인 아이들이 그런 흑인 악당의 이미지를 본다면, 아이들은 마음의 상처가 그들의 행동을 형성할 정신병(정신적 트라우마)을 경험할 것이다. 인생 초기에 검은 피부가 악행과 관련되어있다는 정신병을 경험하는 것은 사람들의 본성을 형성한다.

평가

 20세기 중반에 처음 출판된 이후에 검은 피부 하얀 가면은 식민화된 사람들의 비굴한 심리에 대한 유명하지 않은 책이었다. 1980년대 이후 이 책은 영어권 국가들 사이에서 중요한 반(反)식민주의, 반(反)인종주의 작품이 되었다. 그러나 프랑스어권 국가들 사이에서는 프랑스 식민제국(1534-1980)이었던 흑인 및 유색인들과의 문화적 관련성에도 불구하고 파농의 작품들 중 비교적 중요하게 여겨지지 않았다. 현대의 민족주의, 반(反)식민주의, 해방 이론, 문화 연구의 이론가들은 검은 피부 하얀가면 과 같은 식민 관계의 정신 분석적 설명보다는 대지의 저주받은 사람들(1962)과 같은 프란츠 파농의 이후의 문화적, 정치적으로 혁명적인 작품들을 좋아했다.

앤서니 엘리엇(Anthony Elliot)은 검은 피부 하얀 가면을 '중대한' 작품이라고 표현했다.

같이 보기

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黒い皮膚・白い仮面

出典: フリー百科事典『ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』
黒い皮膚・白い仮面
Peau noire、masques blancs
著者フランツ・ファノン
ジャンル黒人差別、人種差別、差別
国フランスの旗 フランス
言語フランス語
形態著作物
ページ数222
[  ウィキデータ項目を編集 ]
テンプレートを表示

『黒い皮膚・白い仮面』（くろいひふ・しろいかめん、フランス語: Peau noire、masques blancs）は、マルティニーク島生まれの精神科医・フランツ・ファノンが1952年に発表した著書。ファノンは、この頃フランスに留学していた。この本の中では、自動理論のスタイルで書かれており、ファノンは、植民地支配の状況に固有の人種差別と人間性の末梢が、人間の精神に及ぼす影響について、歴史的批評を提示しながら、ファノン自身の経験が描かれている[1]。経済的であり、劣等感の表皮化によって内在化される二重のプロセスがある。

ファノンの暴力的な倍音は、二つのカテゴリーに分類できる。一つ目は、身体、精神、文化の消滅の植民者の暴力と、空間の境界である。そして、二つ目は反植民地闘争を通じて尊厳、自己意識、歴史を戻そうとする試みとしての植民地化された暴力がある[2]。

日本語訳

参考文献

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